My Response to Alex Lichtenstein Regarding the 1619 Project

by Vikki Bynum

The following is my response to Professor Alex Lichtenstein’s essay, “1619 and All That,” recently published in the online version of the American Historical Review.

Dear Professor Lichtenstein,

As one of the 1619 Project critics mentioned in your AHR essay, “1619 and All That,” I hope you’ll indulge me a few remarks of my own in response to several of your points.

First, the issue of my whiteness. I used to believe that historians agreed that one’s racial/ethnic identity or gender should not determine one’s field of inquiry or topic of research. In the last few years, however, especially the last few months, I have concluded otherwise. In your essay, you noted:

As many critics hastened to note, all of these historians are white. In principle, of course, that should do nothing to invalidate their views. Nevertheless, it was a peculiar choice on the part of the Trotskyist left, since there are undoubtedly African American historians—Marxist and non-Marxist alike—sympathetic to their views.

Despite your disclaimer that “in principle” being white should not “invalidate” the views of 1619 critics, in fact the skin color of historians critical of the 1619 Project has been scorned (and far worse) over and over again in the Twitterverse—by historians as well as the general public—as the preeminent reason for discrediting our views. In my case, not one of them has bothered to note (if they knew or bothered to find out) that my entire body of published works over the past thirty years has analyzed the effects of class, race, and gender on the nineteenth-century South. It’s not simply that my skin color matters to certain historians and others. It now appears that it’s all that does matter (with my age a close second).

The fact that eight scholars to date have interviewed with the World Socialist Website (WSWS) has also garnered attention. It seems that some historians, including you, can’t figure out why we shared our critiques in that particular venue:

The animus of the Fourth International types seems clear—in placing race at the center of history, 1619 elides the central role of class and class conflict in the history of settler colonialism, continental dispossession, and rapacious capitalism. But that is probably not the same hill that Wilentz and the gang of four are planting their flag on. So what gives?

Although I can’t speak for the rest of the “gang,” my work emphasizes the centrality of race (and gender for that matter) in the sweep of American history. I entirely agree with Marxist scholars, however, that neither race nor gender can be understood apart from the class systems in which they are experienced. In this regard, I may care a bit more deeply than my fellow letter signers about what is not, as well as what is, in the 1619 Project. For, as you suggest, the Project does ignore “class and class conflict.” It is for just that reason that my concerns are more closely aligned with the WSWS than you have surmised.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that racial essentialism forms the basis of much of the public reaction against historians critical of 1619, since the same essentialism underlies the Project itself. My understanding of class deeply informs my analysis of race, both of which I addressed in my interview with the WSWS, and my essay, “A Historian Critiques the 1619 Project,” published on my blog, Renegade South, and by the WSWS. In both the interview and the essay, I dismissed pseudoscientific theories about separate races and argued that such beliefs predispose one to embrace a theory of hypodescent (i.e., the “one-drop-rule” of race), which posits certain ancestral “bloodlines” as more powerful than others. From there emerges the assumption, implicit throughout the 1619 Project, that only “black” people in North America were enslaved. Yet, anyone familiar with the history of U. S. slavery knows it was a multiracial institution. We know that many enslaved women gave birth to the children of white men (often their enslavers), and that those children were decreed by law to be slaves. Yet, these children were at least as white as they were black.

Northern abolitionists liked to post photographs of enslaved children whose appearance belied not a trace of African ancestry. Mostly they did so to appeal to racist whites who recoiled at the sight of white-skinned children in bondage, but in so doing the abolitionists wittingly or unwittingly exposed the fact that many enslaved children exhibited white as well as black ancestry. Furthermore, the intertwined nature of race- and class-based laws provided an additional means of social control. Southern white lawmakers not only enslaved black and mixed-race people, they frequently appropriated the labor of lower class white children and free children of color by removing them from the homes of their mothers through apprenticeship laws.

For these reasons and more, I object to the 1619 Project’s failure to adequately discuss racial identity, beginning with its failure to contextualize slavery and extending to its seemingly willful determination to omit virtually all interracial relationships and cooperative efforts to end slavery, combat racism, or work across racial lines for the greater good of society. I do not object in order to be “fair” to whites; I do so because to ignore multiracial families and interracial challenges to racism divides American society into oppositional “white” and “black” categories of race that further support the Project’s suggestion that racism is simply embedded in the DNA of our nation. As you yourself state,

The project’s emphasis on continuity (especially in economic history), rather than change, deserves to be challenged. And, as the Trotskyists point out, Marxists may find the substitution of “race” for class relations disconcerting.

Yes. Is it really too much to ask, then, that the Project include more than a century of modern industrialization and class struggles among blacks, multi-ethnic immigrants, and white workers—struggles well-documented by labor historians—as a vital aspect of black history? That economic forces beyond the legacy of slavery have revitalized and reshaped racism, and continue to do so?

Race, I have argued, does not represent objective reality, but racism is nonetheless terrifyingly real. Historically, this nation has enslaved, lynched, raped, segregated, denied full rights of citizenship, incarcerated—indeed, it has denied humanity to—entire so-called “races” of people. The 1619 Project is by no means the first publication to recognize this, as you point out. For over six decades, historians have confronted the brutality of slavery and racism while analyzing the economic and cultural forces that contributed to both. They continue to do so. Why should historians not hold the 1619 Project to the same scholarly standards we demand of ourselves?

Sincerely,

Victoria Bynum

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Post Script: Don’t miss the World Socialist Website’s (WSWS) own superb response to Alex Lichtenstein:  “Reply to the American Historical Review‘s defense of the 1619 Project” 

Surrounded by Death: My Father’s Mississippi Childhood

by Vikki Bynum

Oma Stanley Bynum aka Stanley Smith, circa 1919

“Honey, look what Mama’s got,” Naoma purred as she held up her newborn baby boy for his sister to see. Four-year-old Merle’s eyes popped open wide on this cold November morning in 1917. She’d fussed all night after being banished from her Mama’s bed for reasons she hadn’t understood. Now she understood why. The tiny creature Mama held up to her was her newest brother. Less than six weeks later, Merle was led down the hallway of their house again, this time to view with a child’s horror her mother’s dead body stretched out on a cooling board.

For all her long life, Merle could never erase the twin images of a newborn brother and a newly-dead mother. Little Oma Stanley Bynum, of course, would never know the mother for whom he was named. Neither would he know his father, for in his despair, Aden Gallington Bynum left his infant son to be raised by others.

The infant, immediately nicknamed “Stanley,” was my father. At different times over the years, I learned about the tragic circumstances of his birth from him, his sister Merle, and brother Cerulian. Pretty much all dad knew was that he was born into a large family that already included six sons—Oran, Cerulian, Wendell, Clifton, Harry, and Conrad—and two daughters, Laree and Ilahmuriel (Merle). That within six weeks of his birth a deadly epidemic left him with only four brothers, one sister, and no mother. While still an infant, he was given to his dad’s first cousin, Bertie Mae Bynum, and her husband, Sollie Smith, to raise.

The grim specter of death that hung over the Bynum home ravaged a community, leaving many families decimated by an epidemic likely

Aden Gallington Bynum and Naoma Shows Bynum. A likely wedding photo from 1899.

connected to World War I. Beginning in winter, 1917, and continuing into the early months of 1918, dysentery, “the bloody flux,” combined with measles to devastate the rural Sweetwater neighborhood of Moselle, Jones County, Mississippi, where the Bynums lived. Only the oldest and youngest children, seventeen-year-old Oran and newborn Stanley, and their father escaped the lethal mixture of infection and disease that sickened family members one-by-one.

The scourge began when twelve-year-old Cliff returned home sick from Uncle Johnnie Shows’ farm where he’d boarded and worked for some time. Cliff’s illness swept through the home. By early December seven sick children lay in beds lining the walls of a single room. Early on, little Stanley was removed from the home to Uncle Leon and Aunt Mat Bynum’s for safekeeping.

Uncle Cerulian, a 15-year-old boy too weak even to lift his legs, recalled lying helplessly among his siblings. He never forgot, he told me as

Merle Bynum, who survived, with older sister, Laree, who did not. Jones County, MS, Circa 1916

Stanley’s brother, Cerulian Bynum, circa 1935. They did not meet until Stanley was 16 years old.

he looked up and turned away, the pallor of nine-year-old Laree’s face just before she died on the second of December. Two-year-old Conrad was next. He died on the sixth of December, followed by seven-year-old Harry five days later.

“The bereaved family has the sympathy of the entire community,” wrote the community page correspondent for Ellisville’s Jones County News on December 20, 1917, “this being the third child they have lost in ten days.”

Naoma was also stricken. For a time, she appeared on the mend, but quickly relapsed and became “dangerously ill” as she watched her children die one-by-one. Six days before Christmas she cried out in anguish that she could not bear to lose another child before shutting her eyes for the final time.

“It made us sad to learn that Mr. Aden Bynum lost his dear wife and darling children,” reported the Jones County News on December 27^th.

Meanwhile, little Merle and brothers Cerulian, Cliff, and Wendell struggled against the same fate. Mercifully, they were spared. On January 3, 1918, the Jones County News reported that the remaining Bynum children appeared “about to recover.” And recover they did, but the family unit did not. Fractured by illness and death, it soon disintegrated.

Father Aden fled Mississippi for Alabama, where he met and married Minnie Henderson in 1920. By that time, his oldest sons Oran and Cerulian were sailors with the U.S. Naval Reservation at Gulfport, Mississippi.  The whereabouts of fifteen-year-old Wendell are uncertain, but Cliff, Merle, and Stanley, the youngest children, remained with relatives.

Stanley, the only child formally adopted and taken out of Jones County, did not know his father or siblings for the first sixteen years of his life. On April 29, 1918, the five-month-old infant legally became Stanley Smith, the son of forty-three-year-old Hiram Solomon (“Sollie”) Smith and Sollie’s second wife, who was Stanley’s twenty-eight-year-old cousin Bertie Mae Bynum. The couple had no children together, but Sollie’s son Daniel from a previous marriage lived with them.

In 1920, the Smith family lived in Ward 9 of St. Tammany Parrish in Slidell, Louisiana, where Sollie farmed and Bertie managed a restaurant. Economically, the Smiths were a cut above Stanley’s family of origin. They did well enough to employ black “help,” the ultimate sign of white status in the Jim Crow South. Isiah Smith was their household servant, and Callie Williams cooked for the restaurant that Bertie managed.

Stanley wasn’t told much about his Jones County roots, but he knew enough to ask Sollie occasionally who his real father was. Sollie always

Oma Stanley Bynum aka Oma Stanley Smith.

told him that he had a “living father,” which confused Stanley. If he did have a living father, why then didn’t he live with that father? It didn’t make sense to Stanley. Had he been abandoned? Privately, he entertained the comforting idea that this was just Sollie’s way of telling him that he was his real father after all.

Stanley loved his adoptive mother, an affectionate, fun-loving, and stylish woman who bobbed her hair in the latest style. Once, he told my mother, Bertie took him as a child to the Mardi Gras all dressed up as a baby.

Believed to be Bertie Mae Bynum Smith, circa 1907. Bertie was the daughter of John H. Bynum, clerk of the Jones County Court, circa 1880-1890.

With a baby bottle hanging on a string around his neck and wearing a diaper fastened in front with a giant safety pin, off they dashed to the fair.

By contrast, Sollie was stern, quiet, and quick to take a strap to his son’s bottom whether for wetting his bed or telling a lie. Worse than the whippings was the taunting that preceded them. In a mockingly soft voice, the words, “Now, Stanley, you’re going to be the bass drum, and I’m going to play that drum,” menacingly rolled off Sollie’s lips as he ordered Stanley to bend over.

My dad carried fond memories of Bertie, who died when he was fourteen, but I never detected even a hint of affection when he spoke of the man who adopted him. He never referred to Sollie as “dad,” adoptive or otherwise, but coldly as his “foster father.” I never knew a time when my father did not bite his fingernails so far below the quick that they bled. Nor a time when he did not disappear regularly and violently into a bottle of booze. It took me years to understand the trauma of his birth and childhood that haunted him all his life.

In June 1966, on a long drive back from taking my then-husband to the Air Force facility that prepared him for overseas duty in Vietnam, I finally came to know and understand my father. I mean, we had to talk about something while dad drove, so I asked about his childhood. And he answered. The father who always teared up at the corniest TV drama recounted for me, without tears or a trace of self-pity, his Mississippi childhood. It all came tumbling out—the circumstances of his birth, his early years, his running away from home at age sixteen. As I quietly listened, I knew I’d never feel the same about him again. The man I often reviled for his alcoholic rages, who I had blamed for all the evil that ripped at our own family, was transformed into a human being right before my eyes. All because of that long drive we took that day.